From Music and Work to Hikes and Transformative Adventures, Your Lewis & Clark has 5 Great Programs You Don’t Want to Miss
June 1, 2018 (Helena, MT)—Your Lewis & Clark Library is hosting four fabulous authors and a historian/musician during June. From history to hiking to the art of book making, you won’t want to miss a single event. Each presentation is free and open to the public.
On Wednesday, June 6th historian and musician Bill Rossiter will present: Sixteen Tons and What Do You Get? Songs and Stories of Work in America.
From "I’ve Been Working on the Railroad" to "Take This Job and Shove It," Americans have sung about work, whether they’re nine-to-fivers or dawn-to-duskers. The songs from union halls, mines, fields, factories, picket lines and jail cells are the soundtrack to an important part of American history, and they can still stir us. As one old-timer put it, "The boss had all the money, but we had all the songs." At a time when the nation is debating about what rights workers have, these songs are worth remembering, reexamining, and perhaps re-singing. The presentation is free and open to the public.
Presenter Bill Rossiter is from Kalispell and emeritus instructor of literature, humanities and folklore, will accompany the songs with guitar, banjo, autoharp and harmonica. He is a recipient of the 2015 Governor’s Humanities Award. Funding for the Montana Conversations program is provided by Humanities Montana through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Montana’s Cultural Trust, and private donations.
Your Lewis & Clark Library is thrilled to welcome National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, Jennifer Pharr Davis for a book reading and hike on Saturday, June 16 at 2 PM.
Jennifer Pharr Davis is a hiker, author, adventure speaker, and 2012 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year. She has covered over 12,000 miles of long distance trails on six different continents and has hiked with her husband and two year old daughter in all fifty states. She will be reading from her latest book, The Pursuit of Endurance at the Library on Saturday, June 16. She will lead a hike after her talk. Jennifer's hour-long program will involve storytelling, slides shows, readings from her book, and Q&A. Following the program, Jennifer will be signing copies of The Pursuit of Endurance, which Kirkus Reviews has called "a captivating narrative guidebook that will inspire readers to test their own limits, on the trail and off."
"In her latest book The Pursuit of Endurance: Harnessing the Record Breaking Power of Strength and Resilience, Jennifer reveals the secrets and habits behind endurance as she chronicles the incredible accomplishments of leading athletes in the world of endurance hiking, backpacking, and trail running. With a storyteller's ear for detail and description, Davis distills complex rituals and histories into easy to understand tips and action items that will empowers readers to leverage new-found grit and achieve personal bests in everything from sports and family to the boardroom.
In 2011, she covered the 2,181-mile Appalachian Trail in forty-six days, eleven hours, and twenty minutes, maintaining a remarkable average of forty-seven miles per day. By doing this, she claimed the overall (male or female) fastest known time on the "A.T." and became the first woman to set that mark.
Jennifer has written five books, including three North Carolina guidebooks and two
hiking memoirs called Becoming Odyssa and Called Again. She has also written articles for Blue Ridge Outdoors and Trail Runner magazines and has contributed to articles in
Backpacker, Men's Journal, and National Geographic Adventure.
Montana Book & Toy Co will be on hand to sell books after Jennifer Pharr Davis’ presentation.
The journey continues on Monday, June 18th at 12:30PM as author Christy Day shares her experiences Walking El Camino de Santiago de Compostela. El Camino de Santiago de Compostela is a 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain. Author Christy Day walked it when she was 66 in what she describes as “one of the most transformative experiences of her life.” In pictures and in stories, she shares the joys, challenges, and hardships of this journey. There will be ample time for questions and answers. She wrote a book about the experience, Walking from Here to There: Finding My Way on El Camino. Ms. Day grew up on a sheep and cattle ranch in Savery, Wyoming. New Hampshire has been her home since she graduated from college. In addition to traveling she enjoys sailing and is a licensed pilot.
Montana author and writing mentor Sonja Mongar, will discuss her personal journeys and the imprint those travels made on her imagination as she presents “Writing Real Life into Fiction” on Saturday, June 23rd from 11AM-1PM.
When New Journalist, Truman Capote, penned the true story of the murder of a Midwest farm family in his 1959 novel, In Cold Blood, he coined the term "faction" to explain his creative license in turning fact into fiction. Since then, writing real life into fiction is a rapidly evolving cross-genre trend with sub-genres such as autofiction (fusion of autobiography and fiction), or novoir (fusion of memoir and fiction,) among others.
Sonja Mongar, MFA, journalist, creative non-fiction writer and professor of English will share her own process of writing her newly-released novel entitled Two Spoons of Bitter. The story is a novoir-style, originally based on a diary she kept while employed at a drug and alcohol rehab providing services to people living with AIDS during the initial AIDS crisis in the South in the early '90s. Topics to include: genre characteristics, truth vs. fact, subjects vs. characters, plot vs. non-fiction narrative, writing race and gender, dialect in dialogue, point of view, legal/ethical issues, and method writing among others.
Born a fifth generation Montanan, Mongar has been a traveler all her life which has made its imprint on the landscapes, characters, and dramas of her imagination. There will always be a train, a lost highway, a brooding river, and a character adrift in her stories.
Mongar was a tenured Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico where she "got schooled" on enduring friendships, the treachery of love, the language of ants and the art of hurricanes. She currently mentors writers in the Western Connecticut State Low Residency MFA in Creative and Professional Writing. She is a freelance journalist, photographer, blues harmonica player and occasional car auction driver, she currently writes in the Pacific Northwest, next to a river where she can hear the trains at night.
Montana Book & Toy Co will be on hand to sell books after Mongar’s presentation.
University of Providence Professor and local writer, musician, and printer Aaron Parrett will read from his book Maple & Lead: The Making of a Book and talk about the process of setting lead type by hand for books at The Territorial Press in Helena, for which he won a 2017 Artist's Innovation Award from the Montana Arts Council. He is also known for his books on Montana, including Literary Butte, Montana Then and Now and Montana Americana Music. Come listen to Aaron Parrett read from his work and talk about making a book from scratch during his presentation "Maple & Lead: The Making of a Book" on Thursday, June 28th at 6:30 PM. Come see parts of the printing press and examples of the bookmaking process, and possibly hear a fiddle tune or two.
For more information visit www.lclibrary.org.
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